Friday List: New Year's Resolution

When I was young I like to count the days that I am alive and not the years. Since the number of years is smaller using days would make me much wiser. But then the days piled on, and  for the last 10 years I stopped counting the days and just like everyone else I start relying on the years.  On my 10,227th day on Earth I realised this is a big mistake. Despite my accomplishments, the last 10 years happened without sense of urgency and I found myself consuming and producing things that in essence 'do not matter'. 

My solution to my quarter-life (second-fifth life crisis) is to quantify more.Thanks to technology, there are tools that help me to live more effective. On the positive note of me realizing next year resolution, I have started to curate my data beginning 6 months ago out of curiosity.

In quantifying the state of my life, I will use 3 parameters; namely i) time spend, ii) resources used, and iii) outcome achieved.

• Time Spend - I am using the desktop app by KLOK to measure my usage of time. Currently I'm using the block reserved on writing exercise to write this post. Once I hit the maximum allocated time I have to stop my activity and record 2 important parameters: outcome(s) and interruption(s). 
• Resources Used - I'm dividing this into 2 categories; i) hard resources and ii) time-related activities. Hard resources recording will be things like expenditure and petrol consumption. Time-related activities on the other hand is collection of movies I've watched, quality of my sleep, collection of books I've read and my workday clock-in and out.
• Outcome achieved - It will be in 2 forms; i) hard and ii) unfinished. Hard outcome will be things like an article written or a blog post.  

Apart for intensifying the effort to quantify myself, my daily resolutions will be to reinforce my effort on 2011's Resolution, which are;
i) To write down ideas every morning (15 minutes of creativity exercise)
ii) To write at least a proper paragraph of analytical essay (1 hour)
iii) Spite out-spite good: To be able to take information in front of me and spite out something useful from it.
iv) To sit every night and reflect my day (15 minutes every night)


In addition, my weekly Habits to Reinforce in 2012 are;
i) To analyse weekly data collected (every Sunday afternoon) 
ii) To read 1 professional/academic article every week (I've started doing this early this year but I never got around to record article read nor its benefits). So 2012 it will have to be more effective as I'm using this framework:  

• What question(s) will the paper address?
• What method(s) is/are used in addressing the question(s)
• Did it managed to answer the question(s)
• Did the paper expand my professional capacity i) result-wise and ii) methodology-wise
• Give feedback to the author(s). 

In 2012, I also hope to improve my skills in programming language by acquiring these skills:
i) Able to use Python in Natural Language Processing so I can device a simple program to run through text document and play with information in them.
ii) Able to use Processing to create better data visualization 
iii) Able to use R for my statistical analysis needs


I just realised that this must be the most specific New Year's Resolution I have written. 
Time spend on this post:  1 hour 9 minutes